I

The first night was the worst.

Romochka sat on the bed as a chill crept into the apartment. All his attention was focused on the apartment door.

The building was buzzing, strange. It was filled with curses and screams, as if all the residents were awake, drunk and angry. People were dragging stuff along the corridors, down the stairs, until their voices faded and the bumps and squeaking wheels receded. He could tell people were leaving. Tromping back and forth to get their things, then gone. None of them sounded like Uncle. Every curse, every stumble and scrape, was followed by nothing. No scrabbling at the door, no turning of the key. No familiar hinges sighing. No stumbling entrance. No hairy-nose-breathing in the gloom—only his own frosty breath. He was the only one there, breathing the gloom in and out.

He had been angry with his uncle for weeks, but this anger vanished as the evening lengthened. His eyes slid to the door. He had not seen his mother for a long time, more than a week, and since then Uncle had taken their possessions away piece by piece. First their clock, then his mother’s wooden shelf that had been her mother’s. Then other important things—the square table they used at breakfast, the two chairs, the television that flickered. But Uncle was never late home except on pension day.

Darkness now filled every corner. Romochka climbed stiffly off the bed and yanked at the electrical cord. Nothing. He scuttled to the electric hotplate that sat on top of the shelf beside the coat rack. He knew it was forbidden but reached up nonetheless and turned both cracked knobs. His heart beat hard in his chest.

No click, no friendly orange eyes on the knobs. No ticking in the metal plates up out of his line of sight. Nothing.

He shuffled over to the heating pipes. A bottle clinked and rolled away from his feet. He stretched out his hand.

The pipes were cold. He snatched his hand back as if scalded.

In the bathroom there was no hot water. The phone was dead.

‘Someone,’ Romochka said crossly to himself, ‘has been a selfish fucked-up bastard.’ He climbed back into the bed and deep under the cooling quilts. He repeated it, as if grown-up speech could bring them back, but his voice faltered: his heart was beating too hard. He put his thumb in his mouth and tried to slip into that thumb trance that had once carried him, wide-eyed, through anything. But he hadn’t sucked his thumb for a while and it had lost its perfect shape.

With the exception of the phone, none of this had happened before.

He warmed up under the quilts. His nose and forehead, poking out of the gap between quilt and pillow, were uncommonly cold. He stared at nothing. Rain fell without sound, making dim striations across the rectangle between the curtains. He fell asleep with the strange notion that the outside was coming inside, and that he had to defend what little warmth he had left. When he opened his eyes in the darkness, he was scared by the unfamiliar rush of cold air onto his eyeballs. The window was brighter than before: the first snow was falling. The swirl and eddy of tiny snowflakes made the stillness in the room awful. Layers of silence cocooned his body: nothing stirred in the bed, in the room, out in the hallway, or anywhere in the building. Silence changed everything. The cupboard loomed, enlarged. The padding on the door gleamed in the odd light cast by the window. His ears moved, tweaking his scalp as he strained to hear something, anything; but the building had died and shut out even noises from outside. He could hear only the gurgle and hum of his own body.

The next morning his uncle still had not returned. He got up, glowering fiercely at nothing and everything, and put on far more clothes than he would normally have needed. Feeling bold, he went to explore outside the apartment. There could be no doubt, were he caught: he was up to no good. He would be beaten and locked in the cupboard.

The air was cold and silent. He checked the communal kitchen and was astonished to find that the stove, the sink and all the fridges were gone, leaving a very dirty empty room. Even the inbuilt kitchen furniture was gone, and pipes stuck out here and there from the wall. Muck and dust hung over the old wallpaper that had been behind the benches and stove.

The toilet was still there, so he used it. It wouldn’t flush. There was no toilet paper and nothing at all in the cupboard behind the toilet. The communal bathroom looked almost normal, except that it was dry and its usual humid air had gone stale, leaving only a smell of mould.

He was all alone.

He wandered back to the apartment. Its ordinariness was now scary. Only the cold air gave away the desolation of the rest of the building. His adventurous mood faded and he turned this way and that with rising terror. He raced suddenly to the cupboard, wriggled in and closed the doors, just as though he had been caught, roundly slapped and thrown in. He began to sob as he had many times before, and his ears really did burn with heat and pain. He sobbed harder, then, and rocked back and forth until he fell asleep.

Over the next two days Romochka ate everything he could find in the food cupboard and didn’t bother to clean up. He ate the half packet of biscuits first. Then he crunched through a cabbage, raw potatoes, cereal, rice and macaroni. He got a stomach ache and lay down. When he felt better, he managed to open the two tins of mackerel and ate them. He ate a box of sugar cubes and even tried to chew through a raw onion. There were two jars he couldn’t open, one of preserved plums, the other cucumbers. He thought of smashing them but was too cautious. His mother had told him: You die if you eat food out of smashed glass.

He raided every forbidden space. There was little of interest and nothing edible in any of them. He pulled clothes out of boxes and hauled everything out from under the bed. His mother’s dresses were pretty but flimsy, and one tore as he tugged them from their hangers. He held her peacock dress to his face for a while, breathing in. Then he laid them all gently to one side and went on rummaging. His mother had a little brown coat with fur cuffs, waist and collar. It is so warm, she said often, that you don’t need anything on your legs.

It was not to be found. He gave up. He put on so many of his own clothes that he found it hard when he had to wrestle them down to go to the toilet. He tugged the mattress off the bed and threw everything warm onto it, then spent most of his time in the pile he had made. He was in big trouble if Uncle came back. He wanted Uncle to come back just to show him what happens if you don’t come home on time.

After three and a half cold days and three long, unlit, icy nights he decided he had to leave. There was no particular reason he could see for his uncle and the phone, electricity and heating to leave and not come back, except that his mother had suddenly not come back—and, more recently, the furniture had left and not come back. In his short life his uncle and the phone had in general been less reliable than his mother, the heating and the furniture.

His stomach churned with apprehension as he moved aimlessly around the apartment. Going out to the street alone was forbidden. If you ever set foot outside, both Uncle and I will kill you, first me, then him.

But there was no food.

He procrastinated. He explored the other floors. It no longer surprised him that the building was eerily still and dark. He climbed to level four and knocked half-heartedly at Mrs Schiller’s, knowing that she wasn’t there. The door was unlocked. He pulled it open and walked into her apartment. It was still a shock, even though he had guessed there would be changes. Her big two-room apartment was empty and strewn with rubbish. A harsh light spread over everything from the undressed windows. Outside, treetops with a few golden leaves tossed in silence in the wind. He stomped back to his place.

For a moment he hesitated as he stood in the doorway. The apartment had an insistent homeliness, a pull on him that made him walk in as if things were completely normal. He sat down on the ripped sofa bed and looked around for his mother, ignoring the gaps where the television, table and bookshelf were supposed to be. He walked out, turned, and walked in once more but the strange effect had died away.

His stomach rumbled. He grabbed his red bucket and put a black velvet ribbon that had belonged to his mother in it. He ran down the three flights of stairs, past the burnt apartment on level one and down the main stairs. The buzzer that released the lock didn’t work, but there was a thin white line between the door and the jamb. He threw his full weight against the door and it swung outwards, letting in blinding light.

He dropped his hands to his sides. Hunger and cold had pushed and pulled him down the stairs, but, for the moment, they had all but disappeared. It was a nice late autumn day—a high white sky, dry but very cold. The fleeting snows of two nights before had melted straightaway, but it was cold enough to snow heavily now. His spirits lifted. It couldn’t be all that hard to find food and warmth. Grown-ups managed all the time, with or without money.

From the outside, the building looked unnaturally still. It was an old building, with many broken or ice-cracked panes in its outer windows. None had curtains and there was no movement in the darkened rooms beyond. There was no sign of anybody, except the signs that they had left quickly—trails of debris led from the door; drag marks and the imprint of handcart wheels through clumps of dust, dropped tissues and indeterminate things crushed to pieces under many feet.

Romochka stood in the doorway, watching people passing by on the pavement. They were almost all familiar but he didn’t know any of their names. They belonged in the neighbourhood. They came and left and came back. But no one who belonged to his building appeared. Maybe he should catch an eye, tell someone that he was all alone. They would take it seriously—you weren’t supposed to be outside all alone at his age. He watched for someone familiar who didn’t frighten him. Maybe the shaven-headed guitar man from the blue building three street doors from his. Maybe the fat lady from the corner tenement. She had three big nasty kids, but they weren’t with her today. Maybe the old lady in the pretty cream lace scarf, carrying her two bulging avoski. He could see a loaf of bread sticking out the top of one, but it wasn’t enough to make him talk to her. In the end he didn’t try to catch any eyes. He was overcome with secretiveness and mistrust. His mother’s voice rang in his ears: Don’t talk to strangers.

He stood on the step curling and uncurling his cold toes inside his boots, not looking at anyone. He rocked back and forth a couple of times. His bucket knocked against his thighs. He put it down for a moment on the step and clapped his mittens together, stopping half way, palm to palm. In an adult the pose would have suggested prayer. In a four-year-old it suggested indecision so profound that his body had shut down in order to let him think.

The lane was almost deserted. Frozen puddles here and there gave a dull gleam, wrinkled like the eyes of dead fish. A car roared past, taking advantage of the sudden freedom of no traffic. It disappeared and for a moment nothing moved. It really was bitterly cold, and he knew he had better get moving soon. Still he waited. He was old enough to know that the street belonged to cars and the footpath to grown-ups and big kids. Little kids (and right now he felt particularly little) had no space in the world outside.

The next rush of cars cleared and a large yellow dog passed by on the other side, heading down the lane. Dogs, he said to himself, are warm. He had cuddled Mrs Schiller’s hairy dog Heine many times, and he had a sudden vivid memory of Heine’s warm belly skin and stinky breath. He picked the bucket up again and stepped out through a gap in the fence and onto the footpath. He clattered and rattled down the lane in the same direction as the dog. His mother had told him never to go out the door, never to wander off, never to go down the lane by himself even if Uncle sent him. She also told him: Never go near street dogs. They have diseases that can kill you.

There was no one there to chase him and tell him off, which gave his transgressions a certain hollowness. He was so cold and hungry. Had his uncle staggered around the corner and cuffed him a few times, then dragged him off to some new place to live, he would have sobbed and snivelled but he would have felt much better.

The lane cleared and he crossed in order to be on the same side as the dog. Now he shivered with excitement—he was definitely where he shouldn’t be, where any little kid shouldn’t be, doing what a little kid shouldn’t do. She stopped just ahead, sniffing the corner of a building. He peered at the dog’s belly where a double row of breasts swung as she walked. She turned and looked at him for a moment, then trotted on faster than before, moving in an easy confident way. Her pale yellow hair was thick around her neck. Everything else around him was grey and murky; so, he told himself, she was the only dish on the table. His mother had said that about their apartment, about Uncle, about the flickering television; and about him on those nights when she didn’t work.

Romochka couldn’t keep up. The pavement was slippery with black ice, his layers of clothes bulky and he had to walk flat-footed to stop himself from sliding. An alley led off to the left from the lane up ahead. The dog turned in and, when he reached the corner, she was gone. He sat down on the cold concrete, the bucket beside him. He couldn’t feel his fingers inside his mittens. He curled up against a drainpipe that ran up the wall next to him. A faint warmth seeped through his clothes from the pavement: there were people up in this dark tenement somewhere.

His mother had said many times: Don’t go near people. Don’t talk to strangers.

He’d already done an awful lot of things his mother wouldn’t like.

He didn’t get up. The warmth from the heating pipes under the ground made him listless. He was around the corner from home but his legs were too heavy to do their job. Even his emptiness was too heavy, pressed into the ground by his sleepy bones. His head was too heavy.

A freezing drizzle fell. The black ice on the pavement began to shine. The gutter filled with black sludge and the white lines on the asphalt disappeared in a reflective sheen. His blue mittens glittered with tiny droplets. He shut his eyes.

He heard a faint noise that was more than the whisper of rain, and much closer than the cars on the lane around the corner. He opened his eyes. Two dogs were taking up all the space in front of him, present just as suddenly as if he had been on one page of a picture book and had now turned to the next. They paced in front of him without taking their eyes off him, crossing each other’s paths again and again. One was pale gold all over with a tail that curled back on itself, the other huge and black with cream paws and mask. Both were bigger and clearly nastier than the one he had followed.

They moved around, urgent with some purpose. They stared at him, eyes big and yellow. The rain spangled their fur. He liked dogs, but even he could tell these dogs wanted to hurt him. The dogs snarled at each other just as if he were a dish laid out in front of them and there wasn’t enough for two. He wondered whether it was really possible for a dog to eat a boy. He frowned at them fiercely.

Struggling with his clothes, he used the drainpipe to pull himself up. The dogs jumped back. Then the dog he had followed appeared out of the shadows on the other side. She looked at him as if waiting: head high, tail low. He let the pipe go and crossed the alley towards her. She didn’t move. The two dogs closed in behind with a rub of hair jostling for space and the snicker-snap of bickering. His dog had her ears up.

‘Doggie,’ he said, and she tipped her head very slightly to one side. One of the dogs behind him growled low. His dog lifted her lip over long teeth and growled back, a growl that travelled around him and was aimed at them. He felt the agitation behind him settle and, glancing back, saw that the gold dog was sitting now, watching. He reached his dog, put out his hands. She flinched, hesitated for a moment, then sniffed his face, his chest, his mittens. She was standing still.

Then she waved her tail from side to side, slightly, thoughtfully. The other dogs came up to her then, their heads weaving low, and they licked her face. She licked them each in turn, licked his face too, placing a sticky kiss on the corner of his mouth, then she turned and loped at an easy pace up another alley leading from the first, one he had never entered. People were filling the streets again, trudging, skittering and sliding along the pavements, but he paid them no attention. He focused on his dog and followed closely, the kiss freezing on his cheek. The other two dogs fell in behind neatly, without jostling.

He wondered what these dogs ate for dinner and his stomach sizzled painfully. He suddenly remembered his bucket, back by the drainpipe. Leave something behind, and you can kiss it goodbye. He faltered. Then he trotted on.

They had gone around a corner or two and were weaving in and out of parked cars when he realised he was nearly lost. He thought of stopping. He remembered that the apartment was cold and dark, empty even of his uncle’s smell, and then, before he could think anymore, he was lost. He concentrated on what dogs ate for dinner. He pictured bowls of diced meat and cabbage, all in a row, with one extra for him. But perhaps dogs couldn’t afford diced meat. Perhaps a soup, made with big bones, potatoes and onions. Or chicken soup with noodles. Maybe just potatoes. Hot and steamy. Mashed and buttery. Then he remembered: dogs don’t have money! They steal everything, or get given it! It could be anything. Cutlets! Kolbasa! Dumplings with meat! Chuk-chuk! Donuts! Saliva filled his mouth.

They passed throngs of people who were making their way home or to shops after work but no one stopped the boy or asked his name. He was a boy; his companions dogs. There was nothing to show that he was following, not leading. They looked like three obedient dogs, and he like a boy master—neglected, young to be out alone, but everyone knows without thinking that a person with dogs is not lost.

Three dogs and a boy passed through the populated thoroughfares of the precinct to more deserted lanes. Gates and mesh fences sagged, street walls crumbled. In the distance, apartment blocks were stacked like dishes in a rack, their windows glittering. Close up, weeds filled all gaps. They passed by low buildings with no balconies: offices and warehouses and factory sheds. They passed rows of identical five-storey tenements with cracked tiled façades and a few unkempt birches in the raked yards. They breathed in the smell of cooking onions and cabbage. Inside, people were preparing their evening meals, sitting or moving around in warm rooms, arguing, tired, sipping hot tea or soup.

They slowed only to cross roads or skirt cars or people, then picked up pace again.

A lane opened to a vista with no more streets. Ahead was a meadow filled with oddments of rubbish, ringed with buildings, all unlit: factories or warehouses without people. Then the three dogs did stop and eddy, sniffing in the corner of the street wall and the field fenceposts, moving around the boy, ignoring him. The three dogs peed quickly, here and there. Then they trotted on as purposefully as before. He followed, staggering now. They slipped one after another through a hole in a fence and crossed the meadow through blackened weeds. They made a ragged trail through the icy grass, one track wide and one dainty. At the far side of the field, he stumbled and stopped, swaying on his feet. The lead dog dropped back and waited, looking at him, so he nodded, turned and trudged on.

They squeezed through a gap between a brick wall and a fence post, and then they were among abandoned construction sites. A car passed up the potholed lane and a few scruffy people walked by. A man was lying in a heap against the street wall, asleep. He had been rained on and smelled of wet wool and old urine. The dogs stepped wide around him but otherwise paid no attention.

The boy’s strength was almost gone when the mother dog disappeared through a broken gate. They all in turn slipped through into an ancient courtyard. Here there was a tangled mess of dried grass and a dead orchard of five apple trees, their trunks bearded with lichen. Above, a brick façade ended in a broken cupola silhouetted against the sky. It was a church, a blackened and roofless ruin.

The dogs’ lair was in the basement. They entered through a hole in the floor and clambered down a pile of rubble along a narrow, much-used path. Inside was dark. Somewhere puppies yelped and yabbered.

And so it was, trotting with three dogs through ordinary lanes, past ordinary tenements, past ordinary lives, a lone boy crossed a border that is, usually, impassable—not even imaginable.

At first he didn’t notice.

Romochka could see nothing at all. He was assailed by a stench, pungent even in his cold nostrils. Then he made out a wide cellar with holes here and there in the roof. The two younger dogs had flopped down on the floor to one side and were scratching and licking themselves. They didn’t seem to have any food. He could see some distance now. His dog had trotted to a far corner and was being greeted with delight by four small puppies. He crept close and squatted on his haunches as she was licked and squealed at. He watched as she lay down and the puppies tumbled over themselves to suckle. He could just make out her dark, shining eyes watching him as the puppies pushed and grizzled. He noted her thick hair, her tidy feet, with pale tufts sticking out between her shadowy toes. She was motherly to the puppies: firm and distant and bossy. He wondered what dog milk tasted like, and edged